If there’s any seedy, slimy karma left in this college football offseason, egomaniacal sports analyst Danny Sheridan drops the final, fateful bomb Wednesday afternoon.

Sheridan has been proclaiming on Twitter for nearly a week that he knows the name of the person who allegedly paid Cam Newton to play for defending national champion Auburn, and will tell all on the nationally syndicated Paul Finebaum radio show. Suddenly, though, that story of the year doesn’t look so ominous.

The Miami Hurricanes, in what could be the biggest scandal in college football history, just made the SMU Mustangs of the 1980s look like jaywalkers.

A Yahoo! Sports investigative report released Tuesday revealed a former Miami booster provided thousands of impermissible benefits to at least 72 athletes from 2002 to 2010. The range and depth of the violations are so shocking — cash payoffs, cash bounties on opponents’ players, trips, jewelry, prostitutes, among other things — even Sheridan’s look-at-me moment can’t top it.

The only thing that can: the end of the NCAA as we know it.

For years, some of the sport’s biggest programs and administrators have kicked around the idea of taking their ball and playing by their rules. The 50 or so biggest college football programs would break away from the NCAA, start their own association and get down and dirty.

Basically, the wild, wild West.

This nuclear option was set up in case the BCS imploded; in case Congress forced an antitrust issue on the game’s BCS schools. Now, in this offseason of nonstop NCAA violations, it has to be seen as an option because the game has begun to eat itself in a horrifying example of greed and gluttony.

It’s bad enough that these blatant examples of rule breaking occur. It’s worse when those whose job it is to monitor players are on the take, too.

What else can you call it? Nevin Shapiro, the Hurricanes booster at the center of the report, says Miami knew what he was doing and turned a blind eye. Jim Tressel knew what his players at Ohio State were doing and, to keep his players eligible, didn’t admit it until nine months later. The NCAA says former USC assistant coach Todd McNair “knew or should have known” Reggie Bush was accepting illegal benefits.

And then, the ultimate slap in the face of amateurism: The NCAA declares Cecil Newton shopped his son’s services to the highest bidder, then admits it has no rule against it.

NCAA president Mark Emmert can talk tough; he can call for a retreat of university presidents to fix the game—one of those presidents was Miami’s Donna Shalala, who was hit with damning anecdotal evidence in the Yahoo! report. Emmert can talk of curing the ills of amateur sports. But it’s all a sham.

Full cost of attendance scholarships, stringent academic requirements and multiyear scholarships aren’t going to stop the cheating and the lies and the deceit. It’s not going to keep a coach from trying to keep players eligible, or another coach from ignoring a booster paying recruits, or third-party street agents from trying to influence high school players.

If the Almighty himself couldn’t stop sin, who are we to think big, bad Mark Emmert can?

Look, this stuff has gone on for decades in college sports. It’s just that today’s instantaneous microwave media makes it nearly impossible to get away with. Someone knows someone who knows another who has an axe to grind. And away we go.

There’s really no other alternative. The top 50 schools break away, come up with a system of paying athletes and determining a national champion; of negotiating new multibillion-dollar television deals and divisions of 10 teams each; of eliminating all pretense of playing by the rules and playing for the common good of a common goal.

No more recruiting rules, no more bowl games. No more eligibility standards, no more college degrees.

All that garbage just gets in the way, anyway. Right?

“I just did what I wanted,” Shapiro told Yahoo!, “and didn’t pay much mind toward the potential repercussions.”